Electronic Health Care Records Are Slowly Being Adopted

In today’s Technology Section of The New York Times, columnist Steve Lohr wrote an article entitled "Most Doctors Aren’t Using Electronic Health Records." The article explored the disconnect between large health care providers, like Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, who have fully integrated the use of electronic health care records into their infrastructure, and smaller private medical practices/clinics who have yet to embrace the technology due to high cost concerns. A government-sponsored study was published online on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine which reported that this problem has seemingly placed the health care industry at odds with itself.

Most doctors, who responded to the survey, support the movement towards a paperless health care record industry, but the costs associated with moving away from paper records do not provide enough economic incentive in many circumstances, especially with small private practices and clinics. The article quotes Dr. Blackford Middleton, a health technology expert at Partners Healthcare, as saying that the market for electronic health care records is broken because "the people who gain financially are not the people who pay." That is to say that private and government insurers and hospitals can save money as a result of less paper handling, lower administration expenses and fewer unnecessary lab tests when connected to an electronic health care system, but the burden on many doctors still remains the initial investment of implementing such a program.

The government took steps in that direction last week when it announced a $150 million Medicare project that will offer doctors more incentives to move towards a paperless health care record environment. Thus, one of the major issue, in regards to electronic health care records management, has more to do with cost prohibitions than industry acceptance of the technology. From a privacy perspective, as the medical profession moves more and more towards a paperless system, the need for discernable metrics of retention policy and procedures will need to be addressed. Doctors overwhelmingly are in favor of this technology because it will provide, among other things, a better quality of clinical decisions, avoidance of medication errors, and improve the delivery of preventative care.

The balancing of taking technology that is looked uponn positively in an industry versus managing initial investment expenses, are factors which need to be treated with intelligible concern, otherwise, private patient medical information could wind up in the wrong hands.